Healthy Obsessionshttps://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com
The Adventures of a Mild Obsessive CompulsiveWed, 08 Mar 2017 06:40:50 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngHealthy Obsessionshttps://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com
Moving and a Tangenthttps://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/moving-and-a-tangent/
https://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/moving-and-a-tangent/#respondFri, 12 Nov 2010 17:40:15 +0000http://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/?p=1308]]>Just a quick note to say that I’ll be moving to a different site within the next week. I’ll leave all of this stuff up here, still, so nothing is going away.

Take Our Poll]]>https://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/a-quick-poll-on-celiac-disease/feed/0zellandyneCeliac Disease Doesn’t Go Awayhttps://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/celiac-disease-doesnt-go-away/
https://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/celiac-disease-doesnt-go-away/#commentsTue, 09 Nov 2010 23:21:38 +0000http://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/?p=1242]]>There’s no outgrowing it. It’s not a childhood disease. It’s for life. If you have it now, you will have it tomorrow, and next week, and next year, and next century – should you be lucky enough to live so long.

I’ve had several people tell me, now, that they had celiac disease when they were kids, but they outgrew it. And it drives me bonkers. I try to tell them, no, you should get checked. But they don’t want to hear it.

They are absolutely confident, in a way only the blindly faithful can be, that they do not have celiac disease (and I have been guilty of this, too). And meanwhile they have any of a dozen different symptoms that can result from celiac. I feel like I’m watching someone drowning, and I’m reaching out to grab them and drag them back to shore, but they keep telling me, No, no, the water’s warm.

The medical establishment did believe celiac was only a childhood disease and that you could grow out of it. And that belief has lingered on for decades. As recently as 2004, some medical schools were still teaching that. Many doctors still believe everything they were taught about celiac back when they were in school. They may call it sprue instead of celiac, but it’s the same thing.

Here’s why the belief has stuck around. Children diagnosed with celiac were put on gluten free diets, and they improved. After a few years of that, doctors would tell the kids it was okay to go back to eating gluten. So they did. And, because their intestinal villi had healed in the intervening years, for a while they were fine. They didn’t have the debilitating intestinal symptoms anymore. And those specific symptoms may never have come back. At which point, the doctor declares the kid cured. You no longer have celiac disease, congratulations!

But the kid starts racking up symptoms that aren’t obvious. Maybe the kid doesn’t grow quite so tall as his siblings. Or maybe puberty hits a little late. Or maybe a girl has really irregular periods. Or maybe the kid gets eczema. Or migraines. Or constipation. Or weight gain. Or frequent bronchitis. Or maybe the kid seems asymptomatic for a very long time.

None of those things is obviously celiac related. Here’s a list of classic and less well known symptoms, and I certainly haven’t covered everything.

The cloud of possible symptoms is huge, and there are a lot of other possible causes for all of them. Any illness that can be caused by nutritional deficiency (hello, scurvy!) or inflammation can be caused by celiac disease. This doesn’t mean everybody who ever gets arthritis has celiac disease. But, if you’ve been diagnosed with celiac disease at some point in your life, odds are that’s a good thing to check. If you do the tests and it turns out that you don’t have it, then you were misdiagnosed. You never had it.

So, no. You haven’t outgrown it. If you truly had celiac disease then, you’ve still got it now. And you will still have it tomorrow, too.

]]>https://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/celiac-disease-doesnt-go-away/feed/2zellandynechild-in-wheat-fieldceliac symptomsDid you know AAA got prescription discounts?https://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/did-you-know-aaa-got-prescription-discounts/
https://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/did-you-know-aaa-got-prescription-discounts/#respondMon, 08 Nov 2010 18:57:34 +0000http://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/?p=1238]]>Because I sure didn’t. That was a nifty discovery. Of course, you have to be a AAA member. I should tell my folks about this; they’ve been members for years, and not all of the meds my mom is on for her cancer treatments are covered by insurance.

There. Just texted my father. And made the interesting typo of Rxpensive in place of expensive. Fitting, don’t you think?

(Man, does that entry sound like an ad. It isn’t. I get nothing from AAA for this.)

]]>https://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/did-you-know-aaa-got-prescription-discounts/feed/0zellandyneExplaining Celiac Across a Language Barrierhttps://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/explaining-celiac-across-a-language-barrier/
https://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/explaining-celiac-across-a-language-barrier/#commentsFri, 05 Nov 2010 23:34:25 +0000http://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/?p=1220]]>It’s after my Wednesday evening acupuncture session, and I’m trying to explain to my acupuncturist that, while I’d really like to take the herbs she’s giving me, I need to make sure there isn’t any gluten in the pills.

I kinda figured this would be problematic. Her English is good enough for most things, but there have been times when she’s had to call in the man working the front desk to translate (I’m assuming he’s an acupuncturist in training, because he seems to know his stuff pretty well). In this case, he was at a loss, too.

I said, I have celiac disease.

This prompted a flurry of looking through a translation dictionary. No celiac.

All right. Let’s try sprue. Or gluten sensitive enteropathy. I write both down on a sticky note so he can read them. (Though I’m thinking that latter one is a bigger stretch than celiac).

I pull out my iPhone. See this? I say, showing him a picture of happy healthy intestinal villi. That’s what intestines are supposed to look like. This, I say, going to the next picture,is what mine look like.

Flat! he said. Oh.

Then there was more flipping through the dictionary. Gluten! he said, and then began to read the description aloud. Ohhh! We have this in children, in China. This is immune problem.

And I said, Yes! Auto-immune. Turns out adults can have it, too.

Huh. And you’ve had a scope in your intestine, to see?

Yes, I say, pointing at my phone. That was my intestine.

That was yours?! I thought it was from a text book. Oh! That was your intestine!

At which point, he began pulling herbs and roots out of drawers and showing them to me, saying: This is what’s in that medicine. Which was actually pretty interesting.

It didn’t fully answer my question – there’s the coating and any filler and also the issue of cross contamination. One of the medications, I have been able to ascertain, is probably gluten free. The other… I’m not sure.

But the conversation itself was actually kind of fun. And you could tell he was tickled to have learned something new. And delighted that it was *my* intestine that I’d showed him.

]]>https://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/explaining-celiac-across-a-language-barrier/feed/1zellandynetranslationGluten Free Pound Cakehttps://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/gluten-free-pound-cake/
https://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/gluten-free-pound-cake/#commentsTue, 02 Nov 2010 22:52:58 +0000http://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/?p=1189]]>I am crazy busy today so instead of a detailed, well thought out post, I give you a recipe for pound cake. My friend Wendy and I made this in early October (or was it late September?) At any rate, it was incredibly popular with my gluten eating friends, to the point that one of them says it’s the best pound cake he’s ever had.

It’s very dense and moist, and goes beautifully with whipped cream and berries or ice cream or chocolate sauce. It doesn’t taste like the Sara Lee frozen pound cakes that I grew up on, so don’t expect that. But it does have a great pound cake crust. I snagged the recipe from The Happy Tummy.

Ingredients:

3 sticks of butter, softened but not melted

2 3/4 cups granulated white sugar

5 eggs

3 cups gluten free flour*

1/2 tsp salt

2/3 tsp baking powder

1 tsp xanthan gum

1 cup milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Cream butter and sugar together.

Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating after each.

Stir dry ingredients together in a bowl and add to mixer alternating with milk, starting with the flour and ending with the flour.

Add vanilla extract.

Butter & flour a bundt pan (or 2 loaf pans)

Pour batter into pan and bake for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. (assuming your oven is working correctly)

Check on the cake occasionally to make sure the top isn’t getting too brown. Cover with tinfoil if so, to prevent burning.

Remove and let cool for 10 minutes

Invert onto a plate.

Serve.

My oven decided to misbehave pretty fiercely, so it took more like two hours to bake. My oven does this on a regular basis. The same thing happened with the blondies I made. So I’ve learned to check at the intended finish point, and then usually let it go half an hour longer.

*For flour mix, this time I used the one from Gluten Free Gobsmacked and omitted the xanthan gum from the recipe. I’m sure other mixes would also work.

I am curious about how other people think about this sort of stuff. Do you find it interesting? Boring? Of value? Problematic? Indication of societal decline and the end of days?

Sleep seems like a problematic area for most of the people I know. I wonder if this extends as far into the general population as I think it does. From all the articles and websites dedicated to the topic, you’d think so. But then, you rarely hear from people when they’re happy; you most often hear from them when they have a complaint (if nothing else, working in video gaming has taught me that).

At any rate, I’m curious to see how many people find tracking of value.

Take Our Poll]]>https://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/sleep-tracking-poll/feed/0zellandyneCAT+SLEEPFitbit & Zeo Graphshttps://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/fitbit-zeo-graphs/
https://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/fitbit-zeo-graphs/#commentsThu, 28 Oct 2010 18:35:58 +0000http://healthyobsessions.wordpress.com/?p=1160]]>Because a picture is worth a thousand words, and, honestly, because I am feeling too tired to do much of a write up on anything today… The sleep graphs from last night, starting with the fitbit.

Fitbit Graph for 10-27-2010

And now the Zeo:

Zeo Graph from 10-27-2010

They’re pretty close on the amount of sleep; 12 minutes difference isn’t that much. And they match up on that 6 am waking. Sleep onset, they’re 8 minutes off of each other (I put the fitbit on two minutes after the Zeo, so it isn’t actually a ten minute gap). But, if you notice the movement shortly after sleep onset on the fitbit graph, it actually probably does match up. I just managed to lie still for a few minutes, which it’s interpreting as sleep onset.

The fitbit thinks I had several small wakings that the Zeo doesn’t register, and my own recollection agrees with the fitbit. However, Zeo tells you in their documentation that a waking has to last a certain amount of time in order to register. With the fitbit, all I have to do is twitch*. So that’s a difference in mechanism. I wouldn’t be surprised if you got similar results between an actigraph and an EEG in a sleep lab. But then, that’s why sleep labs use multiple measurement systems. It’s the cumulative data that gives you the whole picture.

It felt very weird. Not painful, but weird. The whole process took less than an hour.

Step 1

The doctor’s assistant numbed the inside of my nose using lidocaine on a q-tip.

Step 2

The doctor injected a local anesthetic twice on both sides. That’s when I started feeling light headed. It’s apparently very common for patients to faint at that point, since the injections are taking place in an area with a lot of nerves.

Dr. Robson Capasso (who introduces himself by his first name, which I like) tilted the chair back for me as soon as I said I was feeling light headed (which nicely prevented me from falling out of the chair, yay). He had a resident shadowing him, and so he was explaining as he did things (and you know how awesome I find that).

Step 3

He inserted the RF needle into each turbinate – I believe he did that three times on the right and four on the left (I am told by a friend that you can have 3-4 turbinates per side). It didn’t hurt, but I did feel a lot of pressure. As he ran the RF, it felt to me like the needle was vibrating. All in all, it felt like he was running a small drill into my nose. There was a bit of pain at the very end of each drilling/RF session.

He explained to the resident that he felt the standard recommendation for how long to run the RF was too long, and that he stopped just short of that since he found it produced less crusting. In my case, it also timed pretty well with when I began to feel pain. So, it seemed well calibrated to me.

My boyfriend, who’s currently doing R&D for an RF device, tells me the vibrating feeling was actually the cells next to the needle exploding.

(I would like to note, it never hurt much. It was uncomfortable, but not painful. Even now, the skin inside my nose just feels tight and dry. I did have a mild headache after the procedure, but two advil took care of that.)

Step 4: Discussion with Doctor

BF: What’s causing her obstruction?

Robson: That, my friend, is the million dollar question. If you can find the answer to that, you will be a very wealthy man.

Apparently, my upper jaw is small, which may be the issue. In which case, the mandibular advancement surgery would be the only surgical intervention that might work. I’m not interested in that one. I’d much rather use CPAP for the rest of my life. Right now, we’re trying to make CPAP use more effective.

Robson says this is just the beginning. We’ll keep trying things until we find something that works for me. I like that. I have a follow up with him next week, at which point my nose should be healed.

Post-op Care

I’m supposed to keep my nose moist using a neutral saline nose spray

If I get a bad nose bleed, call them and go to the ER

No CPAP use for a week

No blowing my nose

Advil and Tylenol are okay, but no Aspirin

Afrin nose spray twice a day for three days to keep the inflammation down

It’s called radiofrequency turbinate reduction. My boyfriend got it done, also, as part of his general sleep apnea surgery four or five years ago (his surgery worked; sadly, I am not a candidate for that same surgery since I do not have the same structural cause).

All of these methods aim to shrink the underlying turbinate by applying heat to the surface lining of the turbinate and creating a lesion. A probe is inserted into the turbinate tissue between one and six times, while the needle is heated and the underlying tissue is shrunk.

That, my friends, is cooking. When you apply heat to flesh, causing that flesh to shrink, you are cooking. (And this makes me think of something a burn-ward nurse friend of mine said about the burn ward essentially smelling like cooked meat; it is very unsettling, she says. Which reminds me of another tangent from which I will refrain since I don’t completely want to gross people out.)

Here is the why: swollen nasal turbinates can contribute to sleep apnea. Very commonly, people with allergic rhinitis will have this kind of swelling. Here, a picture that kind of shows you what and where the turbinates are:

Nasal Turbinates

The air you breathe in through your nose has to go past the turbinates; their job is to clean that air. If they’re inflamed, though, they create blockage, and it’s a lot harder to get any air in past them. This is why nasal sprays like Afrin (oxymetazoline) are so popular. They’re vasoconstrictors. They constricts the blood vessels, which limits the blood flow, which minimizes the inflammation. Unfortunately, Afrin and its kin also cause rebound inflammation when they wear off, which makes you keep using them, which keeps causing rebound inflammation.

Since I’ve been having trouble with CPAP air pressure going too high at night, the ENT wants to reduce my nasal turbinates. I don’t actually have a lot of inflammation there, but I do have some. And I am constantly on antihistamines and anti-inflammatories to help me breathe.

Today’s procedure is supposed to be pretty minor. Local anesthetic only. I’m supposed to take it easy for the rest of the week, and not go back to work today. But I can go back to work tomorrow. Unlike getting the endoscopy for my celiac biopsy – for that one I was told that I wasn’t to make any important decisions whatsoever that day. And someone else had to do the driving.